News Story

EA is a kid in candy land, at Christmas, with their new puppy, being told it'll rain chocolate drops from now on. The 'multi-year' deal struck between the publisher and Disney for Star Wars licensing lasts a decade.

This revelation came from CFO Blake Jorgensen at a recent conference. So far only DICE's Battlefront has been made official, however Visceral and BioWare have something.

There's some encouragement they won't plunge this deal into the abyss of the dark side by going the 'movie adapted to game' route, and hopefully they'll stay on target.

"We've done movie games over the years and we wanted to make sure that we weren't doing a movie game - i.e. a game based on the movie," said chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen. "The beauty of the Star Wars franchise is that it's so broad and so deep you don't have to do a movie game - you can do a game that's very focused on the world that's been created around Star Wars."

"We had a long relationship obviously with Lucas on the original Star Wars, and when Disney took over Lucas they really wanted to maintain a video game business around Star Wars. They felt it was very valuable and a lot of people loved the games historically. And so they came to us because of our partnership, and they knew that we could help them develop really great games, and we struck what we believe is a fantastic deal, which allows us to be able to build games in many different genres across multiple types of platforms over 10 years," he revealed.

"We'll try to align those with the marketing power Disney has so it will get aligned with timings around the movies, but it won't necessarily be aligned with the movie." Let's hope 'won't necessarily' turns into 'most definitely will not, my good sir!' otherwise fans will need to launch a Tauntaun and Ewok assault on EA studios.

Jorgensen also touched on Star Wars: The Old Republic. "Yes the original expectations obviously were very, very large," he said, "and obviously the multiplayer MMO world has - the popularly has come down over time and we tried to restructure the Star Wars business to better match the economics."

"It's a great business that's very repeatable," he added. "We brought the economics in line so it's a profitable business for us." EA and BioWare converted the MMO from a subscription-based model to supporting free-to-play.

"...And as the Star Wars franchises start to grow with Disney's investment, we'll continue to see more excitement around that game as well as the other games that we'll start to produce."